Businesses and consumers are increasingly establishing local area networks in places of business and residences. Typically, such local area networks connect to a wide area network or to a service provider that provides access to a global network, such as the Internet. Under typical network protocols, devices connected to a local area network intermittently access the local area network to send and receive data packets.
In addition to using traditional business and residential devices, users are turning to portable devices that access networks through wireless protocols. Exemplary user devices include personal digital assistants (PDA), mobile telephones, and laptops, each having a wireless data interface using wireless protocols, such as Bluetooth®, IEEE 802.11a, IEEE 802.11b, and IEEE 802.11g. Such devices may access wireless local area networks to provide, for example, email access, web browser functionality, and Internet access for applets.
In general, the networks are accessed on demand, leaving periods of time in which the networks have little or no traffic. As a result, a′particular portion of a local area or wide area network can be heavily utilized at specific instances of time, while a different portion of the local area or wide area network is lightly used.
A service provider may provide access to the Internet. In concentrated population centers, a service provider may provide network service to many businesses and residences. Depending upon the time of day and various functions associated with a business having network access, traffic on a particular local area network and on the service provider's network as a whole may vary. In addition, the type of access and demand for access at a particular time may vary by time of day or day of the week.
As such improved systems and methods for controlling network access and network traffic would be desirable.
The use of the same reference symbols in different drawings indicates similar or identical items.